The Resilient Mary Lincoln
‘In Pursuit’ series features the newest Mary Lincoln biographer, Lois Romano, and her essay on the widowed first lady who refused defeat.
When Lois Romano, a former Washington, D.C., veteran journalist who has covered first ladies, began researching her narrative-shattering, new biography about Mary Todd Lincoln, she was appalled by the way the wife of the revered Abraham Lincoln was treated by his friends, his enemies and the press.
But when it came time for Romano, author of The New York Times bestseller An Inconvenient Widow: The Torment, Trial, and Triumph of Mary Todd Lincoln, to distill her life down to one lesson for the ongoing In Pursuit essay series about America’s presidents and select first ladies, the widowed first lady’s narrative shifted away from the tragedies to one simple word–resilience.
“You can’t judge someone’s resilience in real time. You have to wait and step back,” Romano tells East Wing Magazine in a recent Zoom interview about the newly published essay “Public Service Demands Loyalty, Courage, and Resilience–Not Perfection.”
In it, Roma…
